Leviathan

The pro­lif­er­a­tion of patri­cian bas­tards and soap­box reac­tionar­ies is lead­ing to the slow but sys­tem­at­ic de-glam­ouri­sa­tion of smok­ing on screen. The cat­a­lyst for this is based on a fan­ta­sy that The Kids might deign to watch À bout de souf­flé, pool their pock­et mon­ey then dash down to the newsagents for a deck of Gauloise Blondes. And it rum­bles on, with the pletho­ra of neg­a­tive edi­to­r­i­al cov­er­age aimed at Hayao Miyaza­ki for his swan­song movie, The Wind Ris­es, a lux­u­ri­ant and self-con­scious­ly anti­quat­ed peri­od biopic in which its sub­ject puffs on cig­a­rettes for much of the movie, even (sure­ly amus­ing­ly!) in the com­pa­ny of his tuber­cu­lar girlfriend.

The adverse health risks of smok­ing are not up for dis­pute, but (and this is prob­a­bly part of a longer dis­cus­sion for anoth­er time), its depic­tion in cin­e­ma has altered since the days where a cig­a­rette was lit­tle more than an exten­sion of the actor’s body, a sixth fin­ger if you will. You see ful­some plumes of cig­a­rette smoke in black and white movies and won­der whether it’s a fash­ion of the time or it’s maybe an aes­thet­ic tool used by cin­e­matog­ra­phers to put some flesh on the light.

Leviathan, an exper­i­men­tal fish­ing doc­u­men­tary by Véré­na Par­avel and Lucien Cas­taing-Tay­lor (Sweet­grass), shows smok­ing as a work­ing class activ­i­ty, vital to the well­be­ing of the men whose hard work it doc­u­ments so cre­ative­ly. But it also taps into the pure­ly aes­thet­ic qual­i­ties of smok­ing too, as the fug caused by burn­ing tobac­co helps to bol­ster a pic­ture of the lit­er­al liv­ing hell the direc­tors are attempt­ing to depict.

Lashed by the dri­ving rain, both­ered by insa­tiable fleets of seag­ulls and at the instant mer­cy of semi-audi­ble instruc­tions barked by a sloven­ly shift leader, the work the men in this film do is under­tak­en usu­al­ly with cig­a­rette dan­gling rak­ish­ly from chapped bot­tom lip. Among oth­er great things, Leviathan is a film which places smok­ing in per­haps its only social­ly accept­able con­text — an opi­ate of the peo­ple that helps dull the pain of extreme hard labour. It’s even seen as a roman­tic, post-coital treat, some­thing to suck on after extreme, intense exertion.

Even the most ultra fascis­tic of health freak would find it hard to deny these men their well-earned can­cer sticks. When you’re alone at sea, they are every­thing. They are the world. They are friends. They are moments away from the hor­ren­dous grind. This is a song to the work­ing man, a Bat­tle­ship Potemkin for the age of spray cheese and impul­sive tattooing.

Par­avel and Cas­taing-Tay­lor elim­i­nate the roman­tic allure of smok­ing just as they toy with notions that a job is a noble way to see out your days. Unlike a con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­tary, these men are not trans­formed into char­ac­ters to cre­ate an erro­neous dra­ma. Even though it allows us to infer rich social detail from the shape of the bod­ies, the dirt on their skin, the food they eat and the way they talk, the film is not about them. They are shown as face­less com­po­nents of a more com­plex, but strange­ly tan­gi­ble eco-sys­tem, and their mere pres­ence adds to the tex­ture of the movie as a whole.

Leviathan was made with the col­lab­o­ra­tion of the Har­vard Sen­so­ry Ethnog­ra­phy Lab whose aim is to devel­op inno­v­a­tive new ways of chron­i­cling peo­ple and land­scape. It takes advan­tage of super-com­pact GoPro cam­eras which are rough­ly the size of – iron­i­cal­ly – a pack of cig­a­rettes. Instant­ly, the time­worn logis­tics of the film­mak­ing process have been altered: sub­jects no-longer have the stig­ma of a ​“cam­era” to con­tend with, there is no ​’action’ and no ​’cut’, and they’re able to go about their busi­ness with­out feel­ing like they need to cre­ate a cin­e­mat­ic char­ac­ter and earn their place in the limelight.

The film does have a CCTV feel to it, though these cam­eras also cap­ture sound and are incred­i­bly mobile. In its most extra­or­di­nary sequence, a GoPro cam­era appears to be attached to a long pole and is dipped into the water from the mov­ing boat. We oscil­late between images of sea life and bloody, dis­card­ed chum, to the omnipresent ret­inue of squawk­ing gulls who are poised to sweep all the float­ing detri­tus. Visu­al­ly, it’s a won­der, while also offer­ing a grim alter­na­tive encap­su­la­tion of how the food chain works. God knows whether Par­avel and Cas­taing-Tay­lor knew it would actu­al­ly turn out like this, whether they had con­trol of their images, but the sense lib­er­ty and the mere fact that they’re opt­ing for meth­ods that no-one else has used before is in itself exhilarating.

There is so much in this film to pon­der with regard to how it was made and what it’s say­ing. In show­ing the real­i­ties of deep sea fish­ing and allow­ing view­ers a so-close-you-can-touch/­taste/­hear/s­mell-it vision of life on a com­mer­cial schooner, the film fills a kind of tac­it edu­ca­tion­al remit. When the cam­era takes a delve into a vat of dis­em­bod­ied fish car­cass­es, then pro­ceeds to fol­low the dis­card­ed appendages and blub­ber as they gen­tly slide back into the sea, we’re even plant­ed momen­tar­i­ly in the realms of sci­ence fic­tion or hor­ror — the crea­tures we see, the shapes of their bod­ies, don’t look like any­thing from this Earth. Would the acid-fried ​’head’ movie set warm to Leviathan? Even though it works on those terms, prob­a­bly not. It’d have them jump­ing ship in abject terror.